One-hundred years ago, Route 66, the first cross-country road, was built in America. The idea was to have a way to move people and goods a long way. Revisit these Arizona stories in honor of 100 years of the Mother Road.

Roger Naylor is a longtime Arizona travel writer. He sat down with The Show recently to talk about his year in hiking and road tripping — and what he’s looking forward to next year.

Next year, cities and towns across the country including here in northern Arizona will mark the 100th birthday of one of America’s most iconic highways, Route 66.

The funds from the National Park Service will go towards a program for supporting commercial and civic properties along rural stretches of Route 66 in Arizona.

Nearly 100 years ago, Route 66, the first cross-country road, was built in America. Now, the upcoming centennial of the Mother Road is in 2026. But, we’re losing pieces of that history all the time today.

Route 66 is known for its representation of the expansion to the West, the Mother Road, vintage cars and diners and Americana trinket shops. But, there is another, more troubling history: Route 66's atomic history.

As the old phrase goes, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. If that’s really true, then the Petrified Forest has a lot of treasure from 50 years or more ago. The National Park Service is preserving a lot of what Route 66 drivers and passengers threw out the windows in the mid-20th century and is trying to put it into historical perspective.

Route 66 has long been a nostalgic symbol of American opportunity and Western expansion. But for many people of color who made their lives along the historic route, it was a different story.

A documentary, "Route 66: The Untold Story of Women on the Mother Road," examines how women navigated segregation and gender discrimination to build lives for themselves along America's most famous highway.

During Route 66’s heyday, families drove cross country on the "Mother Road" and took in a variety of roadside attractions from the world’s largest covered wagon in Illinois to a rattlesnake den in Oklahoma. In Arizona, many stopped halfway between Flagstaff and Winslow at a spooky ghost town called Two Guns.

Route 66 was established Nov. 11, 1926, as highway US 66. The road gave drivers freedom to explore America in a new way. But in the 1970s and '80s, the highway had something of a midlife crisis.